Sherbourne Press is a new small publisher on the West Coast, and if The Pseudo-People can be taken as evidence, the house is lively, professional, and prepared to be generous. Edited by William F. Nolan, who has some stature in the literature of auto racing and show business as well as in science fiction, the book is one of a handful which have appeared in the past twenty years or so which combine a genuine love for the genre with a certain scholarly approach.In the process, Nolan affords us a thick clutch of good reading from a truly amazing variety of sources — established masters like Bradbury and Matheson, brand-new authors like Dennis Etchison and Shelly Lowenkopf; stories from the major magazines, but also from some of the early and short-lived ones, as well as originals written especially for this book; copyrights from 1946 to 1965; lengths from short-short up to novella-size; content from amusing whimsy to suspense-drama and the kind of hard-core sociological thinking occasionally found in the best science fiction; and as a bonus, a long and carefully-compiled bibliography of robot stories. There is also an introduction by A. E. van Vogt.
This is the first anthology ever devoted exclusively to the android, which differs from the robot in that it exactly resembles a human being. Nolan has some points to make about the special compulsion of the android idea, makes them lucidly in his prefaces, and illustrates them by his selections. All in all, The Pseudo-People is a gratifying package.
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